Tag: Secular

Publicly funded religious schools, or ‘faith schools’, currently make up around a third of our education system. This limits choice for parents who do not want a religious education for their children, or do not share the faith of their local school.

In order to ensure everyone’s right to freedom of religion and belief is respected, we believe all publicly funded schools should be fully inclusive and equally welcoming to children of all religion and belief backgrounds.

Secular holidays

Some Humanists celebrate official religion-based public holidays, such as Christmas or Easter, but as secular holidays rather than religious ones.

Many Humanists also celebrate the winter and summer solstice, the former of which (in the northern hemisphere) is the root of the celebration of Christmas, and the equinoxes, of which the vernal equinox is associated with Christianity’s Easter and indeed with all other springtime festivals of renewal, and the autumnal equinox which is related to such celebrations such as Halloween and All Souls’ Day.

The philosophy or life stance of secular humanism (alternatively known by some adherents as Humanism, specifically with a capital H to distinguish it from other forms of humanism) embraces human reason, ethics, social justice and philosophical naturalism, while specifically rejecting religious dogma, supernaturalism, pseudoscience or superstition as the basis of morality and decision making.

It posits that human beings are capable of being ethical and moral without religion or a god. It does not, however, assume that humans are either inherently evil or innately good, nor does it present humans as being superior to nature. Rather, the humanist life stance emphasizes the unique responsibility facing humanity and the ethical consequences of human decisions.

Fundamental to the concept of secular humanism is the strongly held viewpoint that ideology—be it religious or political—must be thoroughly examined by each individual and not simply accepted or rejected on faith. Along with this, an essential part of secular humanism is a continually adapting search for truth, primarily through science and philosophy.

Philosophy of Utilitarianism

Many Humanists derive their moral codes from a philosophy of utilitarianism, ethical naturalism or evolutionary ethics, and some advocate a science of morality.
The International Humanist and Ethical Union (IHEU) is the world union of more than one hundred Humanist, rationalist, irreligious, atheistic, Bright, secular,Ethical Culture, and freethought organizations in more than 40 countries.

The “Happy Human” is the official symbol of the IHEU as well as being regarded as a universally recognised symbol for those who call themselves Humanists. Secular humanist organizations are found in all parts of the world. Those who call themselves humanists are estimated to number between four and five million people worldwide.

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Dogma is a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true. It serves as part of the primary basis of an ideology or belief system, and it cannot be changed or discarded without affecting the very system’s paradigm, or the ideology itself.

They can refer to acceptable opinions of philosophers or philosophical schools, public decrees, religion, or issued decisions of political authorities.
The term derives from Greek δόγμα “that which seems to one, opinion or belief” and that from δοκέω (dokeo), “to think, to suppose, to imagine”.

Dogma came to signify laws or ordinances adjudged and imposed upon others by the First Century. The plural is either dogmas or dogmata, from Greek δόγματα.

The term “dogmatics” is used as a synonym for systematic theology, as in Karl Barth’s defining textbook of neo-orthodoxy, the 14-volume Church Dogmatics.
Dogmata are found in religions such as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and Islam, where they are considered core principles that must be upheld by all believers of that religion.

As a fundamental element of religion, the term “dogma” is assigned to those theological tenets which are considered to be well demonstrated, such that their proposed disputation or revision effectively means that a person no longer accepts the given religion as his or her own, or has entered into a period of personal doubt.

Dogma is distinguished from theological opinion regarding those things considered less well-known. Dogmata may be clarified and elaborated but not contradicted in novel teachings .Rejection of dogma may lead to expulsion from a religious group.
In Christianity, religious beliefs are defined by the Church. It is usually on scripture or communicated by church authority. It is believed that these dogmas will lead human beings towards redemption and thus the “paths which lead to God”.
For Catholicism and Eastern and Oriental Orthodox Christianity, the dogmata are contained in the Nicene Creed and the canon laws of two, three, seven, or twenty ecumenical councils(depending on whether one is Nestorian, Oriental Orthodox, Eastern Orthodox, or Roman Catholic). These tenets are summarized by St. John of Damascus in his Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, which is the third book of his main work, titled The Fount of Knowledge.

In this book he takes a dual approach in explaining each article of the faith: one, for Christians, where he uses quotes from the Bible and, occasionally, from works of other Fathers of the Church, and the second, directed both at non-Christians (but who, nevertheless, hold some sort of religious belief) and at atheists, for whom he employs Aristotelian logic and dialectics.
The decisions of fourteen later councils that Catholics hold as dogmatic and numerous decrees promulgated by Popes’ exercising papal infallibility (for examples, see Immaculate Conception and Assumption of Mary) are considered as being a part of the Church’s sacred body of doctrine.
Roman Catholic dogmata are a distinct form of doctrine taught by the Church.
Protestants to differing degrees affirm portions of these dogmata, and often rely on denomination-specific “Statements of Faith” which summarize their chosen dogmata (see, e.g., Eucharist).
In Islam, the dogmatic principles are contained in the aqidah. Within many Christian denominations, dogma is referred to as “doctrine”.

Historical use of the term humanism (reflected in some current academic usage), is related to the writings of pre-Socratic philosophers. These writings were lost to European societies until Renaissance scholars rediscovered them through Muslim sources and translated them from Arabic into European languages. Thus the term humanist can mean a humanities scholar, as well as refer to The Enlightenment/ Renaissance intellectuals, and those who have agreement with the pre-Socratics, as distinct from secular humanists.

The term secularism was coined in 1851 by George Jacob Holyoake to describe “a form of opinion which concerns itself only with questions, the issues of which can be tested by the experience of this life.”

Humanists have put together various Humanist Manifestos, in attempts to unify the Humanist identity.

The original signers of the first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, declared themselves to be religious humanists. Because, in their view, traditional religions were failing to meet the needs of their day, the signers of 1933 declared it a necessity to establish a religion that was a dynamic force to meet the needs of the day. However, this “religion” did not profess a belief in any god. Since then two additional Manifestos were written to replace the first. In the Preface of Humanist Manifesto II, in 1973, the authors Paul Kurtz and Edwin H. Wilson assert that faith and knowledge are required for a hopeful vision for the future. Manifesto II references a section on Religion and states traditional religion renders a disservice to humanity. Manifesto II recognizes the following groups to be part of their naturalistic philosophy: “scientific”, “ethical”, “democratic”, “religious”, and “Marxist” humanism.

One of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God is the design argument: that order and “purpose” in the world bespeaks a divine origin.

Hume gave a criticism of the design argument in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Firstly, Hume argued that for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design.

But order is often observed to result from presumably mindless processes like the generation of snowflakes and crystals. Design can account for only a tiny part of our experience of order.
Second, that the design argument is based on an incomplete analogy: because of our experience with objects, we can recognize human-designed ones, comparing for example a pile of stones and a brick wall. But in order to point to a designed universe, we would need to have an experience of a range of different universes. As we only experience one, the analogy cannot be applied.

Next, even if the design argument is completely successful, it could not in and of itself establish a robust theism; one could easily reach the conclusion that the universe’s configuration is the result of some morally ambiguous, possibly unintelligent agent or agents whose method bears only a remote similarity to human design.

Furthermore, if a well-ordered natural world requires a special designer, then God’s mind (being so well-ordered) also requires a special designer. And then this designer would likewise need a designer, and so on ad infinitum. We could respond by resting content with an inexplicably self-ordered divine mind; but then why not rest content with an inexplicably self-ordered natural world?

Finally, Hume advanced a version of the Anthropic Principle. Often, when it appears that an object has a particular feature in order to secure some goal, it is in fact the result of a filtering process. That is, the object wouldn’t be around did it not possess that feature, and the perceived purpose is only interesting to us as a human projection of goals onto nature. This mechanical explanation of teleology anticipated the notion of natural selection.

In astrophysics and cosmology, the anthropic principle (from Greek anthropos, meaning “human”) is the philosophical consideration that observations of the physical Universe

must be compatible with the conscious and sapient life that observes it. Some proponents of the anthropic principle reason that it explains why the Universe has the age and the fundamental physical constants necessary to accommodate conscious life. As a result, they believe it is unremarkable that the universe’s fundamental constants happen to fall within the narrow range thought to be compatible with life.

The strong anthropic principle (SAP) as explained by Barrow and Tipler (see variants) states that this is all the case because the Universe is compelled, in some sense, to eventually have conscious and sapient life emerge within it. Critics of the SAP argue in favor of a weak anthropic principle (WAP) similar to the one defined by Brandon Carter, which states that the universe’s ostensible fine tuning is the result of selection bias: i.e., only in a universe capable of eventually supporting life will there be living beings capable of observing and reflecting upon any such fine tuning, while a universe less compatible with life will go unbeheld. Most often such arguments draw upon some notion of the multiverse for there to be a statistical population of universes to select from and from which selection bias (our observance of only this Universe, apparently compatible with life) could occur.